Personalizing Pedagogy
Different Gifts for Teaching and Learning
Tom Marino, Temple University Medical School
October 29, 2002

For more from/about Marino, see:
<<http://isc.temple.edu/marino/tom/>>

I have thought a lot about personalizing pedagogy lately.  I have come to the conclusion that what it really means is that is that we need to acknowledge that different faculty have different gifts they bring to the classroom; much like different students have different gifts they bring to the classroom.  The challenge is to bring these teaching and learning styles together to help the student learn.  I am convinced that this way of thinking about the classroom will be much more useful as we discuss how technology might help in the classroom, than trying to come up with a one size fits all template. 

As a young professor, I found that teaching was much harder than I thought.  I tried to teach the way professors had taught me.  I tried to make my classroom like the many classrooms I had spent much of my time in.  There was a clear goal in those days to emulate the professors who had shaped my academic life.  Current colleagues also had an impact on my teaching style, and my attempts to copy their techniques also often met with lukewarm success.  It was an endeavor that was clearly not straightforward or easy.

With my frustration at teaching poorly, or at least not as well as I would have liked, rising, it seemed that using technology might help overcome my lack of success in the classroom.  Using technology would offer alternative approaches to the classroom, and for helping students learn.  Technology might allow for the presentation of information in alternative ways that would be useful to students.

So the use of technology as a panacea that might offer transformative experiences to students seemed like a viable way to make up for my own deficits in the classroom.  The hypothesis was that the infusion of technology could make up for and extend the classroom and help students learn in ways that they appreciated.  Weaknesses and shortcomings in my teaching might be circumvented by appropriate applications of technology.

Over the past ten years this desire to have technology augment classroom approaches seemed reasonable.  However, the issues that started me in this direction never went away.  In fact, the classroom at times got worse and the students more hostile.  Some years the technology would help and I thought things were improving.  But then something would go wrong the next year.  There was an element of teaching and learning that did not resonate with the approaches I tried.  It seemed that teaching with technology, rather than making the classroom better, would often make it worse.

Over those ten years I also have read the works of Parker Palmer, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Ned Hallowell, Steve Gilbert, Susan Saltrick, Louis Schmier, and scores of others as they talked about the classroom in very personal terms.  They mentioned connecting with students.  They talked about being true to oneself.  They talk about being comfortable with who you are and why you are doing what you do in the classroom.  

However, it was difficult to put all of this together in a rationale way.  I had developed a concept of a safe classroom where students learned without fear and for all the times I tried it, it did not always work.  And then one day it hit me.  One of my students asked me what I meant by safe.  After I gave my definition and told him about my book Classrooms Without Fear, A Journey to Rediscover the Joy of Teaching <http://www.newforums.com/tom_marino.htm>, he looked at me and said his idea of a safe classroom was one where all the material was clearly presented and it was very evident what the student was responsible to learn.  If we gave him lists to memorize and facts to learn, and then just tested them on those facts, he said the classroom would be safe. As a student, whether he was bullied to learn or coaxed with encouragement, it was not important.  What was important was to be specific about the learning task at hand.  

What struck me was the clear difference between his definition of “safe classroom” and mine.  Not that I could not appreciate either definition, but what he wanted was so different from what I was trying to do.  He was not interested in my safe environment.  He was not interested in my connected and collaborative classroom.  What was important about this revelation was that he and I were looking at the classroom in very different ways.  And in recent months that has become very important to me.  We were very different people.

Different people.  What does that mean?  What are the implications for teaching?  All of a sudden an obvious flaw in my thinking became apparent.  There was no one right way to teach! And there was no one way to learn!  It is a hard thing to get rid of.  This concept of the right way to do things pervades our thinking about classrooms and about teaching.  But it really does not exist!  We are all different.  We are all individuals and so we all approach teaching and learning differently.  

This became crystallized recently as I taught Neuroanatomy to first year medical students.  I began to realize that not only are our students all very different from one another, they also can carry other burdens into the classroom.  The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry <http://www.aacap.org/> provides some very interesting insights:  between 3% and 5% of our children have Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  About 5% of our students probably suffer from depression at some point during their educational experience.  It is estimated that perhaps as many as 10% of the young women in our classes might suffer from anorexia nervosa or bulimia.  Learning disabilities in general affect 1 in 10 children.  Obsessive-compulsive disorder occurs in as many as 0.5% of our children and adolescents.  Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is estimated to occur in 5% - 15% of school age children.  And then there is child abuse.  And what about children with physical disabilities?

Now you can look at the same set of psychiatric numbers for adults and begin to think about the diversity of the faculty.  You can add other psychiatric diseases that begin in adulthood.  The popular book and movie “A Beautiful Mind” brought out how some brilliant members of the academy have suffered from psychiatric illnesses.  And depression is more widespread in adulthood than in children.

And then you have to consider learning styles.  Felder and Soloman <<http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSdir/styles.htm>> have a wonderful Website devoted to assessing what type of learners you and your students are.  Are you a visual learner or a verbal learner?  Do you like active learning or reflective learning?  Is your approach to learning sensing or intuitive?  Are you a global or a sequential learner?  These issues of learning styles add another layer of complexity to the teaching and learning paradigm.  

So what does this mean for personalizing pedagogy?  To me it means that I first have to find out who I am and be true to my own being.  I need to follow my own heart.  Or as Louis Schmier <<http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html>> has said, “I also know that it matters that I be true to my true north.”  I also need to find out what type of learner I am.  Then I need to try to find out who it is I am teaching.  I need to get to know my students.  I need to treat them all as individuals and try to meet all their learning needs. 

So that is where technology fits in.  The power of technology is that it offers diverse and multiple opportunities for helping students learn.  It also offers wonderful ways for faculty to get to know students and for students to get to know their teachers.  Technology might permit us to acknowledge and design courses that bring out the strengths of both teachers and learners.  

I know that I cannot fully succeed, for I must accept the limitations of my own gifts.  Even with the emerging capabilities that technology is adding to my teaching repertoire, I cannot fully understand, let alone fully meet all the needs of all my students.

I have often read and thought about Chickering & Gamson’s “Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.”  They are: 

1. Encourage contact between students and faculty.

2. Develop reciprocity and cooperation among students.

3. Encourage active learning.

4. Give prompt feedback.

5. Emphasize time on task.

6. Communicate high expectations.

7. Respect diverse talents and ways of learning. 

What I did not realize was just how important the last principle was…and that we should extend it to “respect diverse talents and ways of teaching…”